Useful Again

My therapist calls this my breakthrough session and asked if I'd ever write about it, so here it is. I spent years convinced I had nothing worth offering anyone after a layoff in Erie that gutted my sense of purpose, until a volunteer shift at a food bank reminded me what it felt like to be useful again. Standing in that food bank for the first time, I felt something reach past my own shame and put a task directly in my hands, gently, like it had been waiting for me to show up. I run that same food bank now. The version of me from that layoff wouldn't recognize who I've become, or what put him back together.